Scratch beneath the surface just a little and Chvrches' electro-pop becomes something of real substance. The Glasgow trio's songs, which recall that genre's golden era in the 1980s reimagined through meticulously modern production, initially appear throwaway in the truest sense but later reveal themselves as multi-layered pop at its most colorful. Lauren Mayberry's vocals, complementing the synthesized sounds of Martin Doherty and Iain Cook, are honeyed and innocently delivered yet belie the dark and uncompromising nature of the words she sings: 21st-century chart music seldom deals in such cloaked miserablism as "I'm in misery where you can seem as old as your omens" or is as ambiguously menacing as "I'll be a thorn in your side till you die."